ALKHOBAR, 31 October 2006 — Over the Eid holiday, a company in Egypt offered to upgrade me to 2Mbps ADSL for 200 EGP/month — about SR131. Since I live near Alkhobar, a world away from Egypt’s telecom services, the offer left me profoundly depressed. I now pay SR640 month for a satellite connection — 512Kbps down/120Kbps up. There is no hope in the near future for anything better. My home is located exactly 10.2 km from downtown Alkhobar — not exactly a rural area.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In the past, it might be argued that the technology wasn’t available to provide an enhanced connection. But now, that isn’t so. Enter WiMAX — Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. WiMAX is a broadband wireless access technology that enables connectivity through wireless networks for fixed, nomadic or mobile use in urban, suburban and rural areas.
WiMAX offers a cost-effective broadband access alternative where DSL is unavailable for technical or economical reasons, or a last-mile alternative to unbundling for operators who are offering a combination of voice and broadband access offers to the next generation of wireless devices. The 802.16e-2005 WiMAX standard also called “Rev e,” is a more advanced successor to 802d.16-2004, known as “Static WiMAX,” or Revision d, and offers superior performance and flexibility in pure fixed deployment scenarios.
Based on 802.16e-2005, Alcatel believes that its Universal WiMAX is the way forward to provide broadband connectivity in a single solution to benefit businesses and consumers worldwide.
“Alcatel remains committed to maintaining its leadership in Universal WiMAX, having made early R&D investments in the technology in 2004 that has been augmented, nearly tripling the number of dedicated engineers during the last three quarters of 2006,” said Marc Rouanne, president of Alcatel’s mobile activities.
In addition, Alcatel has established an R&D center with C-DOT the Indian government’s telecom technology development institute, in a joint venture to accelerate the availability of WiMAX solutions to address the needs of high-growth economies such as India’s.
Alcatel’s Universal WiMAX is not some sort of half-baked, “bleeding edge” technology. The company’s Universal WiMAX products are poised for their first announcements of commercial deployments by the end of 2006, with Alcatel anticipating largescale deployments in 2007. Alcatel is supporting a number of Universal WiMAX trials on every continent — 10 to year end — including those with Bell South in North America and Acca in Japan. Alcatel also confirmed that there is one WiMAX trial under way in the Middle East and one in India.
WiMAX 802.16e-2005 is currently undergoing intensive evaluation by telecom operators, with strong interest and demand from the market to put the technology to the test, understand how to deploy and provision service and look at how consumers will respond to it. The first commercial deployments will most likely cover single cities with handsets distributed to friendly users. Alcatel stated that it began distributing commercial Universal WiMAX products last month. The company anticipates that larger scale rollouts will begin in the second half of 2007.
Alcatel’s Universal WiMAX has key advantages over older technologies. Universal WiMAX has no need for direct line-of-sight with a base station. It has excellent indoor penetration, is self-installing and requires no truck rolls. This means that the phone company won’t have to bring a construction crew out to your neighborhood and break up the streets, so they can have access to a cable and make changes to the cable distribution system to be able to handle the two-way transmission.
Unlike local area network (LAN) technologies such as WiFi, WiMAX is a wide area network (WAN) technology that can provide ubiquitous coverage via a cell grid over large areas, blanketing the entire Kingdom. That’s right, if our telecom authority and telecom operators would consider the needs of Saudi Arabia’s population rather than protecting legacy networks and revenue models already in place, in a few years broadband could be available at affordable rates to everyone in the Kingdom.
That claim is not a fantasy. As part of its Universal WiMAX offer, Alcatel in association with C-DOT is developing reference designs for cost-optimized WiMAX end-user devices. The plan currently is to have WiMAX end-user devices priced as low as $50. Alcatel is aware that for the development of WiMAX in rapidly-growing markets, it is important to ensure the availability of robust and simple devices with advanced radio sub-systems, such as self-install indoor and outdoor residential gateways, with data and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services. While Alcatel has no intention to be a major player in the future mass market for end-user devices, the company is intent on ensuring that end-user devices are available with the right features and pricing as WiMAX networks are rolled out.
Although Saudi Arabia continues to lag in bringing broadband services to users across the Kingdom, other economies are ramping up to bridge the digital divide. The Indian government has set a goal of creating 20 million broadband connections by 2010. The Indian government sees broadband access as an important driver of the nation’s economic development since reliable Internet service can spur growth in e-commerce, e-government, e-education and e-health.
In Saudi Arabia, although we have a strong economy and would be well able to afford a massive, high impact WiMAX rollout, thus far, moves in the required direction are weak. With our growing population, difficult geography, the need for economic diversification, cultural limitations on the role of women in society and inadequate telecom infrastructure, it seems that the Kingdom should be at the forefront of the move to 802.16e-2005 WiMAX, not standing on the sidelines waiting while others take first advantage of commercial deployments of this technology.
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